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Liberating Distributed Consensus - Heidi Howard

Liberating Distributed Consensus - Heidi Howard on HackerTube: recommended by 4 Hacker News commenters across 4 separate months, 2019–2020.

Reactive Summit

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Heidi Howard's Reactive Summit 2018 talk on generalizing Paxos by weakening its original requirements. She shows Paxos is one point on a broad spectrum of consensus approaches.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN recommends it as an illuminating, approachable explanation of distributed consensus.

people recommended it
4
separate months
4
strong recommendations
1
discussed on HN
2019–2020
“Heidi Howard is incredible and her work on distributed consensus is illuminating.”
— jganetsk, Apr 2020, in “Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?”

What HN commenters said

4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

jganetskApr 2020Strongly recommends

Heidi Howard is incredible and her work on distributed consensus is illuminating. I think she has actually successfully cracked the cookie of "making consensus easy". ▶ this video

in “Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?” · View on HN

pooooglesOct 2020Recommends

>A more recent development is Heidi Howard's work Glad someone has mentioned her here. This talk helped me greatly ▶ this video .

in “A Review of Consensus Protocols” · View on HN

j-pbAug 2020Recommends

Tbh I think you got it backwards. CALM is actually very much about eventual consistency. The gist is basically, that distributed systems are only eventually consistent iff they are logically monotonic. Coordination as used in this article basically means "needs to be decided by an authority". But because of CALM we know that in order to elect an authority/leader, you need a consensus algorithm that actually has monotonicity at it's core, like raft. There's a really great talk on this by Heidi Howard: ▶ this video I actually don't think that database isolation levels are a good way to talk about this stuff, because they are practical guarantees, not theoretical ones. Snapshot isolation for example also requires a leader. From a theoretical point of view there is no in between (at least none that I can see), either you are eventually consistent or you're not, either you are monotonic or you're not.

in “Keeping CALM: When Distributed Consistency Is Easy” · View on HN

richdoughertySep 2019Recommends

Check out Heidi Howard's work for some nice generalisations and variations of Paxos. Her approach using immutable state makes things more tractable. [link] ▶ this video

in “The Paxos Algorithm, or How to Win a Turing Award” · View on HN

Topics & tags

Distributed systemspaxosraftheidi howarddistributed systemsflexible paxos